Foundation Blog

Welcome to the blog for our foundation classes. The year group blogs are a great communication tool. Teachers will be posting news, photographs, details of homework, examples of work, and anything they wish to share with their pupils and parents. Please speak to your class teacher if you have any question, feedback or concerns.

Mrs Barwin

Blue Class Teacher

Miss Lewis

Red Class Teacher

Mrs Reed

Additional Teaching Support

Mrs Haynes

Additional Teaching Support

Our children usually start school, aged 4, into the Foundation Stage Classes. We believe that they should have a slow and steady start to school so that they can become confident in their surroundings and their teachers, feel safe and supported by the routines and valued as individuals to learn and grow in every way. The children enjoy their learning which follows the guidance in the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum. We offer the children a wide range of stimulating and enriched experiences, both indoors and outdoors, so they can develop their skills in an interesting context.

Yesterday, Red and Blue class were thoroughly excited for World Book Day. They came in dressed as characters and every child could tell us who they were. They even stood up in Meeting and told the school which character they were.

We were very grateful to Valentina, Jessica-Rose and Thomas’ mums who came in and read to us in Afrikaans, French and Brazilian respectively. Thank you for giving up your time, the children enjoy hearing books in other languages.

The children were joined by some parents who read them a range of stories and joined in with our celebration of books.

If you read with your child at home, please encourage them to tell you what they enjoy about the book and discuss the characters with them.

Some of us were better than others, but we all managed to get our pancakes form one side of the playground to the other. Oscar managed to throw his pancake higher than anyone else, closely followed by Muadth, Tristan and Ollie. Back in the classroom we all tasted a piece of pancake (don’t worry, not the ones from outside).

We discussed why we have pancakes, telling them it is known as Shrove Tuesday.

Some children explained what topping they like on pancakes, these included sugar, Nutella, strawberries and syrup.

They tried cucumber, peppers, kiwi, plum, pineapple and pomegranate. We discussed how we were eating a rainbow of foods, with some being green, some pink, some orange and some yellow. We spoke about skins not always being the same colour as the actual fruit, this was noticeable with kiwi and plum.

We encouraged the children to smell, touch, lick and taste each food. We were so impressed with how many children tried and enjoyed all of them.

We used cucumbers as smiles, peppers as swords, plums as fangs, this was enjoyed by all.

The children described how each felt and tasted. We had descriptions such as sour, fresh, watery, yummy, delicious, crunchy, sweet, juicy and slippery. Cucumber and pineapple were clear favourites, however many children enjoyed the pomegranate too.

The rainy weather didn’t stop Red and Blue class from learning outside today. They embraced the wet weather in order to explore a range of areas.

We continued to develop our Mud Kitchen learning, even finding a worm in there! The children made several mud pies, noticing two were full, and one was overflowing as it had too much in it.

Some children explored the guttering, rolling connect 4 wheels down it. They had to problem solve to find the best way to roll the wheels, testing rolling them flat or on their sides. We found that rolling them on the sides worked best. The children worked collaboratively, taking turns to roll. They then compared which had rolled the furthest, standing by theirs to mark where it had landed.

Some children decided to use the large Numicon, counting holes and ordering the pieces from 1 to 10.

Today, we took the mud kitchen outside and began setting it up ready for use next week.

Some children used spades in the digging patch to fill buckets with mud, while others unloaded our large range of spoons, mashers, pots, pans and trays.

In 1 bowl, we then poured some water in to the mud to make it easier to manipulate and in the other, some children found stones, bark and sticks to add to the mud to give it a different texture.

We then had a go at using it!

One child wrote todays mud menu, Mud Cek (Mud cake). They then proceeded to make them using a ladel to fill the pots, a masher to flatten the cakes, and a spatula to fill the pots right to the edge. They explored filling the bowl on a weighing scale and noticed the mud was heavy.

A group of children found some natural materials to ‘decorate’ the mud cakes and pies with. Stones, shells, leaves and bark were popular choices, while sticks were used as candles.

If you bake at home with your child, please encourage them to use language of weight and capacity and maybe even write their own menu! We would love to see them.

Yesterday we had a visit from our Sustainable School Partner for Eco Awareness – Samuel Ryder, they work with us to share their knowledge.

The two 6th Form Students took whole school meeting and led a quiz about how to care for our planet. Our children were incredibly well behaved and made us all very proud. They had lots of prior knowledge about recycling and how we are affecting our planet.

We then showed Samuel Ryder our next Eco project “Upcycling” which you will hear more about very soon.

The children in Purple Class have been counting down since before last half-term and today we celebrated our 100th Maths Meeting of the year. This is a part of their school day the children really look forward to and participate enthusiastically. The purpose of these short sessions is to consolidate key areas of Maths and introduce new topics daily. We start each meeting with a song or a chant (some Abba chorus too!) and talk about some calendar facts. Lately we started introducing money and you might have noticed your child looking more carefully at the coins in your purse. They can describe most coins so far and are starting to understand the value of each. We will be looking at different ways to make a 100 using the manipulatives we have available in class during Maths Meeting this week.